Mother Nature is giving the nod to regenerative agriculture, a rehabilitative approach to growing food crops that focuses on plant diversity.
The practices associated with regen ag are starting to gain ground because of benefits such as improved soil health, natural disease control, insect control, less reliance on fertilizers and pesticide and profitable yields.
Proponents of regen ag came to Stonewall last week armed with experiential knowledge, scientific data and photographs of the good, the bad and the ugly on agricultural fields. Blain Hjertaas from Saskatchewan and Paul Overby from North Dakota spoke about why farmers should jump aboard the regen ag movement.
Against a backdrop of increasing extreme climate events, soil compaction from decades of degenerative farming practices, the high cost of farming and a drawdown in interest from younger generations wanting to pursue farming as a career, regen ag is a way forward to prosperous farming and food security.
The speakers were sponsored by the East Interlake Watershed District in collaboration with the West Interlake Watershed District and the Manitoba Association of Watersheds. The three organizations hosted a free day-long regenerative agriculture workshop on Nov. 14, attracting 45 farmers to the Quarry Park Heritage Arts Center in Stonewall.
Blain Hjertaas has 50 years’ experience farming, is semi-retired and works as an educator to help other farmers adopt regen ag practices. He said the regen ag approach is easier, more enjoyable and profitable. But with any deviation from standard practice, regen ag will earn you some notoriety.
“When you start down a different journey than your neighbours, it’s really good to have people to help you because the neighbours think you’re an idiot. When we moved down this regenerative journey, and when you’re the first one in your community, people … will be talking about you in the coffee shop. And that isn’t always easy to deal with. It’s hard to be different.”
Most of the farming done today is “degenerative farming,” said Hjertaas. Degenerative farming practices include monoculture (growing one type of crop), using too much fertilizer and too many pesticides, failing to keep land covered with vegetation and disturbing the soil with activities such as tilling. Degenerative farming results in unhealthy, unsustainable soils.
The main challenge with regen ag is convincing farmers to change the way they farm, to work with nature, not against it as they’ve traditionally been doing, said Hjertaas.
In the 1970s when he started out, glyphosate [a controversial herbicide] and fertilizers (nitrogen and phosphorus) were becoming generally accepted. He used “truckloads” of fertilizer. He was growing more grain, but he was also spending more and more on fertilizer and said “we weren’t getting ahead.” He knew it wouldn’t be sustainable in the long run.
After reading some literature on grazing in Africa, he sowed some of his grain land back to grass and leased some cows. With green on top feeding the soil and retaining moisture and herds moving through the field recycling nutrients, his soil started to recover.
“Over a few years I realized my soil was getting better as I did that,” he said. “We’re capturing sunshine with the leaves on the surface and pumping sugar down to the roots. The roots should be fuzzy. I was taught the roots should be white but that’s not accurate. Those sugars are feeding the microbes and the microbes are creating aggregates [soil particles around organic matter],” he said. “That’s how you get rid of soil compaction. That’s how we take carbon from up here and put it down here. That’s how you increase the organic matter of your soil and increase your soil resiliency.”
Non-compacted soil can also absorb lots of water. In times of drought or too much precipitation, healthy soil can take a beating.
“How effective was a rainfall? Did you make the water go into your soil or did you let the water run off? The choice is ours by the way we manage our land. The goal on our farm is to capture every single raindrop,” he said. “In 2014 we had heavy rainfall, but our farm held the water while others saw water run off the fields and ditches were full.”
There are five basic principles in regen ag: (1) keep it green as long as possible so that plants can convert sunshine (i.e., photosynthesis) into organic compounds (2) sow a diversity of plants to stave off disease and tamp down the use of pesticides and fertilizers, (3) keep armour on the soil surface to prevent water from evaporating (4) minimize soil disturbance through activities such as tilling, overgrazing, monoculture and overuse of pesticides and fertilizers, and (5) incorporate animals to promote soil fertility through the recycling of nutrients and spread of microorganisms, said Hjertaas.
Black soil is bad practice and a common sight across western Canada. It’s vital to keep soil covered to prevent moisture loss.
“When I drive … I look up and down the roads at this time of year, and do I see cover or do I see black dirt across most of western Canada? I see black dirt just about everywhere I go,” said Hjertaas. “We’ve had an exceptionally warm fall … and even yesterday we’ve got soil-water evaporation occurring on black soil. We can stop that by keeping armour or litter or whatever you want to call it on the surface of the soil.”
A diversity of plants – e.g., sowing oats and flax together in one field or rye with hairy vetch – will prevent plants from competing for phosphorus at the same time, which occurs in monoculture crops. Different plants will work together “sharing nutrients and moisture,” said Hjertaas. Plant diversity also keeps insect predation and disease at bay.
“Let’s say I’m a flea beetle. If I flew into [a field sown with different plants], I’d be discouraged because it would be hard work to find something to eat. But if I fly into a canola field, I hit heaven. Everywhere I look I’ve got something to eat,” he said. “What do we [farmers] do? We do 22 million acres of monoculture in canola and we spend a fortune trying to control flea beetles. Does that seem intelligent? We need to re-think how we do agriculture.”
He has statistics that show crop losses to insects are getting worse. In the 1970s across North America, five to six per cent of crops were lost to insects. Since the 1970s the use of insecticides has increased by seven times. Farmers are now looking at 13 per cent loss of crops to insects.
“Are we making progress. How stupid can we be? Plus, we’re killing bees, ourselves and probably killing all the predators – and that’s probably the biggest issue of all,” said Hjertaas. “Insecticides don’t know which predator is good and which is bad; they kill everything. Guys are spraying their canola three times this spring. Diversity is your best friend.”
Hjertaas said it’s all well and fine being “green,” but farmers have to make a profit with regen ag. He showed participants cost benefits of the practice.
One producer in northwestern Manitoba had planted rye and hairy vetch together, which resulted in “quite reasonable” yields and “no inputs into that crop” except seed. The vetch “provided nitrogen to the rye.” Another producer near Brandon sowed oats and peas together, using no nitrogen and reduced phosphorus. Although he ended up with a higher oat yield than he’d get doing monoculture oats, his pea yield was not as good as doing monoculture peas. But the benefit was no spending on nitrogen.
Other regen ag practices such as integrating cover crops with animals resulted in higher yields. Bale grazing in the field resulted in 800 per cent more grass for one farmer, and strip grazing using fencing to let fields recover resulted in improved soil health.
Paul Overby from North Dakota has been farming since 1993, is supervisor of a conservation district and a regen ag data junkie, who shared the results of various trials he’s conducted on his own 1,800-acre farm. His trials include poly cropping (growing multiple plant species in one field), cover crops, reduced fertilizer use and no-till management.
No-till management prevents disturbance to the soil, which is beneficial for fungi growth, he said. Fungi work collaboratively with plants to bring them nutrients. He also has pasture land divided into paddocks and grows different grasses using rotational grazing with “no other treatments.”
To reduce fertilizer inputs, he’s mapped his fields using satellite imagery in order to identify where the high yielding areas are and to identify low productivity and saline areas on which he’s planted various mixes of vegetation such as alfalfa and grasses.
“I think [mapping] is key to have an understanding of different dynamics in your field because if we’re talking about reducing inputs, there are parts of the field where that’s more critical,” said Overby. “We manage our inputs based on this.”
He started planting peas and sunflowers with wheat, barley and flax for diversity, to “constantly keep weeds off balance” and to make better use of water, especially in the fall.
He uses tools such as the United States Department of Agriculture’s crop sequence calculator to determine how to space out his crop rotations, as well as ag tools from Manitoba.
“I have a flax field that I want to rotate to something else next year. What do I put in? Do I put soybeans or sunflowers? I used the [USDA] calculator and it said sunflowers are probably best,” said Overby. “Manitoba Agriculture Services Corporation also has a tool that tells you what crops you should plant in rotation and how they’ll yield.”
He has a mix of crops which include broad leaf crops, grass crops, cold season and warm season crops and late season crops. He’ll have a number of years between sunflower, pea and canola plantings as all have issues with disease.
“Other things we’re trying is balancing nitrogen and phosphorus requirements. I’m really big on using university research,” he said. “What we’re doing is giving our soils a break from adding fertilizer. We’re letting the natural processes work in the soil instead of adding to it.”
He’ll do crop rotations then analyze nitrogen and phosphorus levels through leaf tissue analysis. It’s important to determine whether there’s adequate nitrogen and phosphorus to “carry the rest of the crop” when cutting back on fertilizers, he said.
He said he gets asked whether he’s doing this regen ag “stuff” for fun or whether he’s making a profit. In the long run, a farmer can’t be sustainable if he’s not profitable.
He said he has done multiple trials with cover crops such as vetch and corn with wheat and oats and it has resulted in no yield losses.
“It didn’t hurt the yield and I did soil testing. Part of why I want a cover crop in there is to improve my soil health. In the control area where we didn’t have cover crops, we saw a ranking of very poor [soil]. Right next to it where we seeded a cover crop into the oats, all of sudden we’ve got [an average ranking],” he said. “These strips are next door to each other, 40 feet wide. It’s not like this was in a different part of the field. This is the impact this cover crop had growing in the oats. It didn’t get above average, where I would have liked to see it, but at least it moved up a couple of notches.”
He’s currently doing trials with peas and canola.
“We done a couple years of trials. The first year we started out with two five-acre strips in a 25-acre field. We planted the peas first then came in and planted canola on top of that,” said Overby. “We have all these different plots in the field and we can start doing some analyses of what’s working and what isn’t. We took samples from every plot and got them analysed. It’s not just yield I want, but quality of pea protein. In one year, it was hard to draw a conclusion, but we’re okay.”
He works with students from North Dakota State University’s agriculture program and does “a lot of soil-health testing.”
Other regen ag practices include the use of shelterbelts consisting of multiple species of trees rather than a single species such as a spruce tree, which is not native to the prairies. Having different trees won’t result in their dying at roughly the same time and leaving farmers with miles of dead shelterbelts.
The workshop included a panel discussion on regen ag practices and shelterbelts with farmers Andrew Harris from Stonewall and Scott Beaton from Balmoral, as well as Blair English, an agronomy and agroforestry specialist.
